THE MEASUREMENT OF EARNINGS MOBILITY AMONG OCCUPATIONAL GROUPS (original) (raw)

1982, Scottish Journal of Political Economy

The stability, or otherwise, over time, of the occupational structure of earnings is a subject of considerable interest. Among the many papers in the literature that deal with this question, one can identify perhaps three underlying issues. The first, and the one with the longest history, is the study of changes in earnings differentials over time.' The measurement of occupational differentials in such studies usually consists of tabulating or charting the movement of earnings of a specific group relative to some central measure of all earnings. Such information, though illuminating in many ways does not provide an overall measure of changes in differentials. One might think that any standard measure of dispersion, such as the coefficient of variation' would do for this purpose, but this is clearly unsatisfactory in that it does not identify links between groups over time. The same measure would emerge, for example, if one took any permutation of the earnings of the different groups. Hence if earnings were xi, x2 and x3 for three groups in the first period and xi, x i and x j in the second period then the change in the measure of dispersion is independent of how xi, x i and xi are permuted between the groups 1,2 and 3.

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